I'm very sorry about the lack of blogging lately but our IT consultant has just been in and I am back up and running again! Here are some pictures of our very busy and fun day in Glenroe Farm. A huge thank you to Caroline, Katarina and Aoife for coming along to help us out.
We had a lovely day on Friday, with so many teddies in to visit us. We had lots of fun working with the our teddies during the day. We kicked the day off dancing with them and then we did a Show and Tell introduction of our teddies. It was amazing how many led such colourful backgrounds!!! The teddies helped us practice our maths skills. We measured their height and found out how many cubes tall they were. We weighed them also to see if they were more or less than 2 tubs of playdough. We had a sounding out game to play too (it is on the back of the booklet the children brought home, if you would like to play it at home.) Our Teddy Bears' Picnic! Those lucky teddies were fed very well and even got to be reunited with some teddies in other classes - Cillian's teddy, Elfie see his pal, Rudolph and Michael, our caretaker's teddy came for a little visit too. And finally a few shots of the Teddies' Disco and some gymnastics skills in the yard! :) I hope you are all enjoying the sunshine and having a lovely break. We have moved on from our Big Box sight words (Danny, Zeb, planet, saw etc) and are now working on the Jolly Phonics sight words (the yellow cards they brought home.) These words cannot be sounded out - they need to be learnt by sight. Knowing these words will increase your child's fluency when reading, helping them to be come a confident reader. We were very excited to go out on our nature hunt on Monday, as we had to delay it on Friday when the rain started. I am not sure what was more fun, the nature hunt or using clipboards (especially when a little insect landed on Sean's.) We did great group work during SESE (science, history and geography) on the topic of "People Who Help Us." Here we are coming up with different jobs and discussing why they are helpful to us. In maths we are learning about weight. We made predctions about which item would be heavier and lighter. And then we learnt that we can't always tell which is heavier just by looking. We made much better predictions when we looked and held each item. We said goodbye to our tadpoles on Thursday. It has been really interesting having them in classroom and watching them change and grow. And wow have they grown! When I returned them to the pond I found the frogspawn in, I was surprised to see how much bigger they were than the other tadpoles. (The warmer temperature indoors definitely helped, as they would have hatched quicker.) Our station work this week involved a weight station, sightword games (Swat with our new tricky words and Power Tower with our older words) and style trays. We had a great session with Adam, from St Anne's GAA. We played lots of fun games and work on some ball skills. Adam will be back with the class for the next few weeks, on Thursdays. There is also a Macra session on every Saturday morning at 10.30 and/or a hurling nursery on Mondays from 6-7, if anyone is interested. No need to pre-enrol, just pop up and it is usually ok to try a few sessions for free. And finally, here are some pics of the children during morning activities and playing during Golden Time. We had great fun during Active Week, last week. We "Walked a Mile, with a Smile" on Monday. We went down by the weir and along the Dodder river. We loved seeing Scoil Carmel from the back and the secret gate. And who could resist running down the hill? We also had a great yoga class on Tuesday and on Thursday we split the class up and went to do some Playball, which was a big hit, as always! (Unfortunately I don't have any photos of them at playball as I was with the other groups.) We did the 10@10 everyday and lots of GoNoodle! :) And of course, there was lots of great exercise activities going on at home that we heard all about and many children did extra challenges for their homework. Well done everyone! We will be going on our school tour to Glenroe Farm on Tuesday 26th of June. Forms and information for the day will be sent out closer to the date. We will be looking for a few parent helpers from each class to join us but we will need everyone to be Garda vetted. If you are interested, please get the garda vetting forms from Veronica in the office.
Thank you Next week is Active Week! Please wear tracksuits/shorts everyday. We will be doing active homework all week, rather than the usual! :) On our first day of sunshine, Thursday, we had a lovely walk over to the church. We walked around it and learned about some of the different features and said a little prayer before coming back. At big lunch, we had a picnic out in the yard. You might have heard about our special classroom visitors. It has been very exciting watching frog spawn develop into tiny tadpoles and, by Friday, into not so tiny tadpoles! We will keep the tadpoles in the classroom for a while and when they are turning into froglets I will return them to Cruagh Woods. Here is a little photo timeline of our tadpoles. (As frogs are a protected species, I have included a photo of the licence allowing schools to collect spawn for educational purposes.) We also made some lovely frogs in art, we did lots of work on the lifecycle and we even acted through the 4 different stages in drama. Lots of fun! :) We had dress up clothes as one of our morning activities, which is always very popular! And, by request, we kept it out for Golden Time on Friday. Have a look! I hope you all have a lovely break over the Easter. We had some very busy weeks , on the lead up to the break, between Seachtain na Gaeilge and Arts Week. We had a lot of fun this week, with hip hop, the 1st class talent show and our very own show! And what talent we have! Hip Hop with Donk was great fun. Even those who weren't feeling very well tried their best to be involved. The highlight was the hiphop circle where the children showed off their own moves. After the inspiration of the first class talent show, which we were in the audience for, the children were very excited to show off their own talents. We had a variety of dancing, singing, karate and even swimming! We have had a great time with Ms Wheeler over the last few weeks and learned lots of interesting things. Unfortunately we have to say goodbye to her now but hopefully we will see her around the school again. Best of luck to her in her future career teaching.
Bhí a lán spraoi againn an tseachtain seo caite, le haghaidh Seachtain na Gaeilge. (We had lots of fun last week, for Irish Week.) Benina, the zumba teacher, came in and did a fantastic zumba workshop with us, through Irish. It was really fun and exhausting! She had some great help from Darragh and Beth, who go to Zumba with Benina on Wednesdays. We practiced our three colour patterns again while making Irish flag chains. We had a lá glas on Thursday and had so much Irish cheer going on in the classroom. Look at our great outfits and accessories! We had a lovely day back in school today. With just over half the class in, it was much quieter than usual. We did lots of art today, including painting and clay. With clay, we made coil pots (which was pretty tricky but we got there) and then we did free play with the clay and created some fantastic pieces. We had to make use of the rare snow and so we did a little science experiment. We put crepe paper on a page and coloured tissue paper on another and we covered it with snow. As the snow melted, we saw that the colours from the crepe and tissue paper ran....but they ran right off the page. Sometimes experiments don't work out as well as we'd hope! :) We decided to repeat the experiment and see what happened when we used hand towels instead of paper. It was very interesting watching the colours spread and mix. We learnt that tissue paper is more absorbent than regular paper, it "sucked up" the colour much better. That was all so much fun and of course, everyone wanted to touch the snow, so we had to each make our own ones. I hope you have all enjoyed the snow! I am sure that, after 5 days of being house bound, you will be delighted to hear Scoil Carmel will be open tomorrow. A JCB has cleared the front of the school today and it is accessible now. The side gates will be closed all day and everyone can enter from the front door.
Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow. :) |
Star of the Week
Well done to Emma, our Star of the Week. Archives
June 2018
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